


Processions

by scarredsodeep (orphan_account)



Category: AFI
Genre: Burials Era, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by the Yahoo Backspin interview, M/M, Tales from 2011, how crash love davey became burials davey, sad but almost sort of hopeful, so they can join me in crying forever, which everyone should watch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9596753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Jade has always been the person Davey calls to put him back together again. Even when--especially when--Jade's the one who broke him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> A 2011-era fic about what happened to change Crash Love Davey into Burials Davey. I watched the Yahoo Backspin interview, which everyone should do, and then this happened. I hope you like it. I like it. Except for/because of how it hurts.
> 
> It has literally been four years since I completed a Javey fic. The last time I wrote a *purely* Javey fic like this one was LITERALLY 2006. So please. Enjoy? And if you want more Javey Truther pain never forget I have an insane blog devoted entirely to that at inthewhispers.wordpress.com . Thanks for reading, whoever's out there. <3

* * *

 

_If you leave me crushed, I'll crawl to find you_  
_Love comes quickly and I'm indisposed_  
 _And what I can't describe is what I want the most_  
 _Love so sickening, and I'm indisposed_  


Davey opened the door. “Thank you for coming,” he said. The words were inadequate, but there weren’t any others. The sight of Jade on his doorstep was so familiar as to be worn: a photograph handled too often, gone soft and fuzzed at the edges, grains of color creasing off. Davey felt grateful. Davey felt nauseous. Davey felt a lot of things.

Just looking at Jade made him tired.

Jade ducked his head to acknowledge the thanks. He stepped inside, bangs obscuring one amber eye, part of one freckled cheek. That was a small mercy. Davey had a bad track record for what came after meeting Jade’s gaze, and the last time they’d been in the same room—almost a year ago, now—Jade made it incredibly fucking clear they weren’t doing _that_ anymore. Which left only the other thing: the brutal, mutually assured verbal destruction.

Jade looked so much older than the way Davey pictured him. The sideburns gone, the eyes unlined, the hair dyed ash brown instead of skunk-striped. When Davey looked at Jade, he _felt_ the passage of time, squeezing his heart, coarsening his skin. But the eyes hadn’t changed. Jade’s eyes were exactly the same as when they met, as when he ripped up his voice screaming backing vocals for File 13, as when he joined the band and they wrote Malleus in the throbbing course of an afternoon—

As the fall when they fell in love.

Jade’s eyes were also the same as when he left Davey. Jade’s eyes were the same as when he fell in love with someone else.

Davey laughed like a broken thing. It was an accurate characterization. “Fuck, it’s hard to look at you.” When he called Jade, Davey decided he was going to try something new—he was going to try being direct and honest. Obviously nothing else had worked. All the glitter and camp, all the oblique scorn and seduction, an entire album of recrimination and pleas for Jade’s return—none of it had made Davey feel any better. None of it filled Davey’s mouth with anything but ash.

None of it had made Jade come back. Not in any way that counted.

He called Jade because Jade was the person he called, when he needed to be put back together. Jade was always the person he called. Jade was the only person he called. Even when it was Jade who broke him apart in the first place. He did _not_ call Jade because he thought it would feel especially good, or because he thought it would be easy.

Jade didn’t seem to find it easy to look at Davey either. Davey turned away under the pretense of closing the door. It was mostly to escape, just for a second. To take a breath. It was so easy for them, once—two broke, sweaty kids sharing a condemned frathouse room too small for just one broke sweaty kid, drawn together like magnets, jagged-hot songs bursting out in a process more like rupturing than writing.

Now Davey can’t look at him. Now Davey can’t speak his name.

Davey looked like shit, felt worse. Davey hadn’t slept in a week, did not recall the last time he’d eaten. It’d been so long since his apartment door had opened, he was surprised the hinges still worked. He was surprised there weren’t more cobwebs. Weren’t cobwebs traditional, in a mausoleum?

Davey was not at his best.

Davey turned back to Jade without bothering to hide the tears making tracks down his face. Without a word, Jade opened his arms, pulled Davey to his chest, and held him there.

Into Jade’s bony chest, Davey wept.

He wasn’t holding anything back anymore. He could no longer care whether it tore them apart.

x

Jade sat on the bathroom floor, leaning his back against glass shower doors, while Davey showered for the first time in—shit. In a while. It was very modest of him, Davey thought, to keep his back to Davey’s nakedness as if they didn’t know each other’s bodies by heart. As if Jade hadn’t been the one to chastely strip Davey out of his rank-smelling clothes and force him gently into the shower in the first place.

Davey became aware of himself singing while hot water pounded oil out of his scalp: one of the first songs they ever wrote together. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used his voice for this. For melody. He sang softly, self-consciously, was surprised when Jade joined him on the _whoa-ohs_.

x

Jade vanished while Davey was putting on clean jeans and an ancient hoodie. Had clean clothes always felt so good? Perhaps that was why people traditionally changed them daily. Davey had been subverting the custom for some time. It all just seemed so… _effortful_.

Davey paused over his reflection in the steam-streaked mirror: short wet hair, curling in his eyes; cheeks stretching thin into sharp chin; Jawbreaker hoodie from, fuck, over 20 years ago; small hands hidden inside large sleeves. He hadn’t meant to, not consciously, but he’d dressed himself as a version of the person Jade fell in love with. Rather than as himself. He watched his reflection bite the absence of his lip ring. He checked the neat, unpainted fingernails on his real hands. Grounding himself. Making sure.

There was food waiting in the living room, takeout containers decorating Davey’s low, glass coffee table. Jade knelt over it, fussing with chopsticks and packets of soy sauce. The detritus that used to occupy the table had been disappeared, and an open window carried away the ugly remnants of an apartment funk vs. Thai food showdown.

“Hope you still like Jade Palace,” Jade said. The words were small, stinging, ordinary. Hearing them, Davey recognized the containers: from their favorite takeout place. From another life. Davey hadn’t ordered from there since Jade moved to LA. He didn’t _know_ if he still liked Jade Palace. That seemed funny, but not in a way that made him want to laugh.

Davey opened cartons of basil fried rice, of garlic pepper tofu, of veggie wontons. They had been friends for most of their lives; of course Jade would remember Davey’s favorite things to order. Of course Jade, kind person, good friend, would order them all.

This was painful.

Six years since Jade left him, and still he couldn’t make himself believe they wouldn’t end up together. Not until he got that beautiful cream fucking envelope in the mail, his name all whorled across it in purple calligraphy. Somehow it felt the same as losing Jade all over again, all at once.

There was no casual way to say _marry me instead_ and no point to saying it: every other time Davey had, Jade only said _I’m sorry_ or _you know I can’t_. He had refused to pronounce the words _I won’t_ , but Davey heard them. Davey didn’t believe in marriage or monogamy anyway; he said it loudly to anyone who wanted to listen. He’d probably be saying it even louder now.

So instead of saying any of the old things, rehashing for the nth time all the reasons and ways they were destined for separate forevers, Davey scooped food he didn’t want onto a plate. He ate mechanically, trying to be gracious. He tried not to look at Jade.

With Jade here, Davey felt so much less ragged, less dangerous, less desperate, less edged. Really. This was the most okay he’d been in two weeks. Since the invitation came.

“You’re quiet,” Davey said, moving rice around on his plate. The food was salty, packed with flavor—vibrant and spicy and tasting of green, all things he usually loved. He felt too pale and washed out to stomach it. His abdomen cramped with either hunger or fullness. He didn’t really care which, could not tell the difference.

“I don’t really know what to say. Was it the right thing, for me to come? Should I be sorry for something I feel so much happiness about? Should I act like we’re throwing a funeral instead of a—”

Davey knew he would not survive Jade saying the word out loud. Even though it was the most Jade had said since arriving, Davey cut him off. “Of course not.” Davey felt small, sitting on his carpet with a plate of stomach-turning kindness as his only shield.

For so many years he had not needed shields, had used his voice for a weapon.

“I’m angry at you,” Davey said, trying out the words, finding the flavor preferable to anything on his plate. “I don’t want you to be happy, if it’s not with me. I’m just realizing that. It took me what, six years? I’m very stupid about you. I can’t—I cannot think about you being with her without thinking about why you aren’t with me. Why you wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or—won’t. I am falling the fuck apart.”

Jade watched Davey, the most minute downward turn of his lips symbolizing a frown. He looked terribly fucking calm.

It felt good, being honest. It felt good, laying out the bitter truth. It was the opposite of poetic. It was corrosive, not at all coy. It was ugly, cramped, hard to look at.

Davey wanted to stare into his suffering like it was the sun, til it burned out everything soft left in him, til it left him blind. He wasn’t going to write pretty fucking songs about his sadness anymore. He was going to cut that part of himself _out_.

“You called me anyway,” said Jade.

“I called you _because of_ ,” snarled Davey. He put his plate down so forcefully, rice spilled across the tabletop. He was done with it. He was done with all of it. He was so fucking tired of feeling so—broken. “Even when it’s _you_ breaking my heart, you’re the one I call. There’s no one else, Jade. I don’t have—I want so badly for it to be different, but it’s _not_.”

Jade grimaced, nodded. Understood. It wasn’t just that Davey had called—it was that Jade had come. Had insisted on coming, even. Davey hadn’t asked him to. Davey didn’t ask Jade for things anymore.

Yet here Jade was.

“So what do we do?” Jade asked, splaying one of his big, skeletal hands like the universe would drop the answer into it, just because he asked. He looked even thinner than Davey remembered, the round smiling cheeks of his youth gone hollow, almost gaunt. The bags under his eyes matched Davey’s. They were their own shadows, these days.

His heart banded by nothing but a cicatrix, the memory of years-old scars a poor and bitter glue, Davey said, “Can you—will you write a new album with me?”

x

They weren’t starting, not really—just trying to find their sound again, or for the first time, since neither of them could any longer inhabit the places they had been before, the spaces they had once made homes. Davey didn’t have any guitars in the same way he hadn’t ordered Thai food from Jade Palace since 2006, so Jade used his laptop and voice to lay out tentative melodies instead. They come out heavy, atmospheric, maudlin. Davey’s voice joined up with Jade’s in a way that seemed to suck all the air and sunlight out of the room. Even with a riot of light streaming in through Davey’s big windows, the room was dark.

It was not easy. It was not natural. It—hurt, coming out. Like scraping poison from his lungs and spitting it, black and hideous and corrupting, onto the floor between them. It felt like it was _meant_ to hurt.

But it felt good, too. Felt like, if he could not change or excise the softness in him, maybe he could at least bury it. Maybe, if he could not make it _hurt_ any less, he could lay down enough poison and gravedirt that he might somehow _survive_ it.

“Blackness drips down from both of my eyes. I can feel it,” Davey spat, somewhere between singing and accusing, into a distant twisting melody Jade pounded out of his keyboard. He watched Jade closely.  He made sure Jade could feel it, too.

x

Before Jade went home, they made arrangements for a writing space down in LA, a friend’s house Davey could stay in with a treehouse-type room that might be perfect for writing. They couldn’t just write from their bedroom anymore. It wasn’t going to be that kind of album.

On Jade’s last day, Davey allowed himself to be coaxed out of the house. Jade dragged him to all of the Oakland sights, a painful tour of Jade’s old favorite places. It was time to move, Davey decided. It was time to set himself up in a place that didn’t make him feel anything.

They sat sipping almond lattes outside Donut Farm, watching the flow of pedestrian traffic and talking lightly about the ways the Bay had changed. “Kids with boards have _mustaches_ now,” Jade observed. “What happened to mohawks and skinned elbows? Are we old men now? If I get on a skateboard, am I gonna break my damn hip?”

Davey smiled over his coffee, watching Jade watching everybody else. It felt easier to fit inside himself today, alongside all the complicated and painful things he was feeling: about Jade, about the upcoming wedding, about the last fucking decade of his life, about himself. He felt—expanded. Large enough to contain it, if not comfortably.

It was the first time he’d left his house since the invitation arrived. Davey started to think that if he could only get angry enough, he might even survive this.

“Really, thank you for coming,” he said. He meant it. “I know it can’t always be you who takes care of me. Who I call for—this. I’ll find someone else, next time. I will. But I’m grateful—I’m glad this time it was you.”

“Why won’t it be me next time?” Jade asked, eyes narrowed with mock concern. “Did I do that badly? Am I being fired? You’re my best friend, you know. For some reason.”

Davey showed a smile in spite of himself. He didn’t understand how he could hate Jade so much and love him too. His love was so total, so vast—it contained multitudes. It weathered anything. He was going to need a much bigger shovel, if he was going to bury this. If he was going to put it all beneath him.

If he was going to put himself above it all.

Jade met Davey’s eyes as steadily as if it was 1997, as if they hadn’t yet fallen in love and out of it again, as if they had never broken up or spent years trying to break each other open again fucking, as if Jade had never laid on Marissa’s ears the question he wouldn’t even entertain from Davey’s lips, as if their mutual cowardice and cruelty hadn’t drowned to sleep every golden thing they’d ever tried to lay their filthy hands upon.

Jade met Davey’s eyes as if they were different people entirely.

Davey didn’t know how the fuck he could do it. He didn’t know how Jade even _dared_ , after all he’d done to Davey and all he hadn’t. In the wake of so many sharp and burning years of all they’d done to each other.

“It can’t always be you who puts me back together,” Davey said again, this time with venom. He could feel the tension straining tendons in his shoulders, in his neck. Davey pronounced each word carefully, laying out rules and regrets so he might bind them both.

And Jade said, “It can. It will.”

Jade said, “I’m part of you, Dave. I am.”

Jade took Davey’s hand while tears bit Davey’s eyes, blurred Davey’s vision. It was a small mercy, not to have to see the ferocity with which his hand grasped at Jade’s, the desperation with which he held on to the only thing he’d ever wanted. It was a small mercy, to never know what showed in Jade’s eyes.

Even then, Davey didn’t believe it could really stay buried.


End file.
